Archives for December 2011

There’s nothing like a Progressive who’s not worrying about reelection. If you thought Barney Frank’s moobs were repellent, wait until you get a look inside Lynn Woolsey’s brain. The 10-term House Democrat from Marin County is retiring this year, so she finally feels that she can speak freely. It’s not pretty.

For example, we learn why Woolsey doesn’t like Michelle Bachmann, who holds, not just a JD, but an LL.M. from the prestigious William & Mary School of Law:

“[S]he’s an idiot,” Woolsey said. “It’s not very politic to say that of another member of Congress, but she is.”

As it happens, I’m not overly impressed with academic credentials, since I think they often train people away from decency, logic and common sense, but I feel obligated to point out here that Woolsey’s education consists of . . . well, it’s unclear. According to Wikipedia, she attended a lot of schools, but doesn’t seem to have emerged with any discernible degrees. That’s okay. She clearly had enough education to lose her decency, logic and common sense anyway.

Woolsey doesn’t like Newt Gingrich either:

“He would be the worst president on earth.”

She does concede, though, that he’s got a brain, which would make him more dangerous than the “idiot” Michelle Bachmann.

The Tea Party crowd don’t fare well in Woolsey world, since she sees them as an impediment to saving the world from climate change (never mind that the climate change narrative is unraveling before Woolsey’s eyes):

“Half of them have never held an elected office in their lives; they don’t know nothing,” Woolsey said. “They don’t know why they’re against what they’re against. They don’t know what is happening to our environment. All they know is it’s not something they’re supposed to support.”

Poor Lynn. She apparently missed the poll showing a wide-spread belief that Tea Party members are better informed than your average 10-term member of the House of Representatives. I guess it’s axiomatic that the ill-informed are always the last to know to that particular truth about themselves.

Lynn may not like Tea Partiers, but she does love the Occupy crowd:

“I love the Occupiers,” Woolsey said. “They’re such a breath of fresh air for me. I’ve been waiting for them for a long time.”

Interestingly, Woolsey is not a Barack Obama fan. Not only is he too conservative for her (“He’s a moderate president. He’s not a progressive.”), she thinks he’s not a very nice person:

“He is kind of a cold, aloof guy.”

Back in 2008, she was rooting for Hillary, both because she thinks Hillary is a more principled Progressive than Obama (there’s a scary thought), but also because she thinks Hillary has the cajones Obama lacks.

Woosley, apparently, isn’t the only one who isn’t thrilled about Barry. Although Woolsey was speaking to an “overwhelmingly liberal” crowd, I think she sensed a certain chill in the air when it came to Obama. How else to explain the fact that she felt compelled to tell those in attendance that they must vote for him in 2012:

“Do not stay home,” she said. “Any one of those other people — we thought George Bush was a problem, huh.”

I wish I’d been at Woolsey’s talk. Seeing the Progressive mind unfettered is kind of like wading in an old swamp. It looks ugly and smells bad, but there are still interesting things swimming in the depths.

Every year, blogger extraordinaire Doug Ross publishes a “fabulous 50” list of top blogs for the year. I’m very, very pleased to say that this year’s list includes, not only my own Watcher’s Council (with the nice addendum that “All 2011 Council members are winners”), but several other bloggers whom I count as friends. In addition, there are a lot of familiar names that, I’m sure you agree, totally deserve to be on the list.

You should go check it out. I bet that you’ll be pleased to see many familiar blogs/bloggers getting the recognition you think that deserve, and you might deserve some other blogs that deserve your attention.

Yesterday, I did something I almost never do: I saw a first run movie. In this case, the kids and I joined family friends to see Mission Impossible : Ghost Protocol. I was not sanguine, because I’m not a Tom Cruise fan and because it’s the rare movie lately that doesn’t either bore or offend me. Either I have a very low threshold for boredom or taking offense, or Hollywood is not doing a good job catering to my demographic — older but, God forbid, not old; female; a parent; middle class values; conservative politics.

I was surprised to discover that I enjoyed the movie. Tom Cruise was Cruise-y and there’s just no getting past that, but this was a good vehicle for his chipmunk charms. Considering that he was getting beaten about like a Rock ’em Sock ’em Robot, his chipper good cheer in the face of continual assaults made him seem androidish, but it was still okay in a pleasantly farcical way.

The movie’s plot was ridiculous. More than ridiculous. Completely ridiculous. Fortunately, I didn’t expect anything else. The indestructible Tom Cruise and his sidekicks (pretty girl, clown-like tech guru, and angst-ridden other sidekick who drifted into the movie) saved the world in approximately two hours. They battled their way through Russian prisons, dangerous tall buildings, dust, and parking garages. It was all very exciting.

Credit for the movie’s entertainment value goes to director Brad Bird, who did several Pixar movies, most notably (in my mind) the delightful Incredibles. Rather brilliantly, Bird took the same manic, kinetic humor that infuses his computer animated movie, and moved it, intact, into a live action film.

What really made the movie was the choreography. Dancing? No, there wasn’t any dancing. When I say choreography, I mean the fight scenes. They were as ridiculous as the rest of the movie, of course, since nobody, not even a crazy man hopped up on angel dust, could take the punishment the good guys and bad guys dished out to each other (and that’s not even considering violence by dust), but they were still really beautiful. They flowed wonderfully, and one had the feeling of character movement, not just camera movement.

On the subject of camera movement, versus actor movement, one of the many reasons I dislike the Bourne movies, aside from the fact that Matt Damon is about dramatically inspiring as a chair, is the fact that Damon cannot move. He’s a lumbering, lump-like thing. Since he’s supposed to be a dynamic action hero, the only way to compensate for his static physical presence is to have the camera hop about maniacally. It’s irritating and cheap.

In Mission Impossible, though, Tom Cruise, to give him credit, is a genuinely physical being, perhaps the most athletic major star since Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. I know that there are stuntmen involved, but Cruise clearly does a lot of the stunts himself, and he radiates a physicality that lends itself very well to creative, dynamic, playful fight-scene choreography.

If you’re looking for a fun way to spend a couple of hours this New Year’s weekend, there are worse things to do than seeing Mission Impossible. I would bring earplugs, though. Not for the movie itself, which was too loud only a couple of times, but for the previews, which consisted almost entirely of things exploding at top volume. I don’t know if next year’s crop of movies will be good, but I can assure you that they’ll be loud and combustible.

I have been brooding about an article I read the other day, one that describes the brave new world of job interviews. According to the Wall Street Journal, many companies, having recognized that traditional interview techniques aren’t necessarily a good way to determine whether someone is right for the job, have moved on to brain teasers, intermingled with questions that the really stupid jobs counselor at your high school might once have asked:

Jim’s first interviewer is late and sweaty: He’s biked to work. He starts with some polite questions about Jim’s work history. Jim eagerly explains his short career. The interviewer doesn’t look at him. He’s tapping away at his laptop, taking notes. “The next question I’m going to ask,” he says, “is a little unusual.”

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

The interviewer looks up from his laptop, grinning like a maniac with a new toy.

“I would take the change in my pocket and throw it into the blender motor to jam it,” Jim says.

The interviewer’s tapping resumes. “The inside of a blender is sealed,” he counters, with the air of someone who’s heard it all before. “If you could throw pocket change into the mechanism, then your smoothie would leak into it.”

“Right… um… I would take off my belt and shirt, then. I’d tear the shirt into strips to make a rope, with the belt, too, maybe. Then I’d tie my shoes to the end of the rope and use it like a lasso.”

Furious key clicks.

“I don’t mean a lasso,” Jim plows on. “What are those things Argentinian cowboys throw? It’s like a weight at the end of a rope.”

No answer. Jim now realizes that his idea is lame, but he feels compelled to complete it. “I’d throw the weights over the top of the blender jar. Then I’d climb out.”

“The ‘weights’ are just your shoes,” the interviewer says. “How would they support your body’s weight? You weigh more than your shoes do.”

[snip]

How are companies coping with this new environment? In September 2009, the Labor Department reported that job seekers outnumbered job openings by 6 to 1. These unemployment numbers have spread riddles, loaded questions and multiple-interview marathons across the corporate food chain, into mature and less cutting-edge industries. Each year Glassdoor.com compiles a list of “oddball” interview questions (puzzles, riddles and the like) reported by members. In the most recent list, only about a quarter of such questions came from tech firms. The rest were from mainstream corporations, from Aflac to Volkswagen.

“If you could be any superhero, who would it be?”

“What color best represents your personality?”

“What animal are you?”

These questions, posted by job candidates on Glassdoor.com, aren’t from some wacky Silicon Valley start-up—they’re asked of applicants at AT&T, Johnson & Johnson and Bank of America, respectively.

Before I go any further, I have to interject here that I was at the cutting edge of this trend. A long, long time ago, when I was a young lawyer at a big firm, a young man came for an interview. But this wasn’t any young man. His former fraternity brother was one of my colleagues and was part of my social group at the firm. We thought it would be a great joke to give this young man (I’ll call him “Tom”), the job interview from Hell. That’s what you do to former fraternity brothers, right?

After much persuasion, the firm allowed us to co-opt an empty conference room and convene a “special panel” to ask Tom some follow-up interview questions. His former fraternity brother was literally hidden behind a potted palm.

When Tom walked in and saw a row of men and women, all strangers to him, but all young, he suspected a gag, but as there was no way for him to know for sure, and as this was a law firm in San Francisco (read: potentially wacky), he had to play along. We started firing off questions:

If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

Are you a linear or a circular thinker?

What kind of superhero are you?

What kind of animal are you?

And no, I’m not simply copying my questions from the list of questions asked at AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, and BofA (per the above Wall Street Journal article). Back in the 1980s, we still understood that those questions were jokes.

Tom bravely fielded the questions, and we let him in on the joke at the end. What’s sad is that today’s young interviewees walk into and out of that room knowing that it’s no joke.

I haven’t been brooding about that article simply because it brought up an old (and fairly amusing) memory. I was actually thinking about what would happen if I had to face an interview like that today. I’ve been looking for permanent work in desultory fashion, which means I want to start working again, but I’m thankfully not desperate for work. I’m also a very secure person. (I’m neurotic too, and I can tell you that being simultaneously secure and neurotic is one cool party trick.)

So what would I do if a prospective employer asked me really stupid, irritating question? My instinct is that I would have nothing to do with it:

“Sorry, but I don’t play games. I meet all the written qualifications for this job. I’m also very intelligent, utterly reliable, completely honest, and a very pleasant person with whom to work. Asking me questions about blenders or trees or superheroes will not give you any greater insight into my ability to do well in this job. Sometimes, you just need to gamble. Hire me for a six week trial period, and let’s see how it goes.”

I’m not the only seasoned worker who feels this way. One of my friends went on a series of job interviews last year. She complained to me about the stupid faux-psychological questions fired at her. “Bookworm,” she said to me, “I just don’t have the patience for that stuff. I told them that I can do the job, my resume proves I can do the job, and they either like me or they don’t.”

One of the consolations of aging is that insecurity lessens. Watching my two children navigate their middle school and high school experiences is a good reminder that youth and insecurity are a matched set. Considering their age, my children aren’t grossly insecure (a nice combination of a good community and, I flatter myself, adequate parenting), but they’re still constantly worried about the usual things that plague young people: “Are these clothes right?” “Do I look stupid?” “Will anyone notice this zit?” “If I hang with so-and-so will it help or hurt my social standing?” As to that last one, I’m pleased to report that my children are sufficiently decent people that they do not reject potential friends merely because the friends don’t rank high on the “popular meter.”

I was infinitely more insecure than my children. Immigrant parents, urban schools, a child-free neighborhood (I was the only kid on my block), thick glasses, and a diminutive stature all left me seriously questioning my place in the grand scheme of things. Time, though, has a great leveling effect. Over the years, I’ve come to terms with who I am. I know my virtues and my failings. I embrace the former and am reconciled to the latter. As Popeye so aptly said, “I yam what I yam.”

It took me a few decades to get to this level of self-knowledge and security. There are some life experiences, though, that accelerate a person’s knowing, and coming to terms with, himself. I’ve often commented to my sister that military guys dance. That’s not as stupid an observation as it first seems. I love getting out on a floor and dancing. I’ve got no training, it’s questionable whether I have moves, but I don’t care. Dancing feels wonderful. Sadly, middle class guys, for the most part, don’t dance. Back when they were 13, they figured out that dancing wasn’t cool and the decades have done nothing to shake their unswerving belief that dancing makes them look less than manly.

So why do military guys dance? (Scroll down for the last three pictures at the link.) I’ll offer you four theories about why military guys dance. Theories one and two are mine, theories three and four come from a friend who is actually in the military, so he’s probably more correct than I am.

Theory Number One, harks back to my post thesis, which gives it pride of place here: Military guys don’t need to worry about whether they “un-man” themselves when they hit the dance floor. By their willingness to put themselves on the front line, they’ve proven everything they need to prove. They zoomed up to the top of the secure self-image mountain, without having to spend decades in insecurity purgatory. They can dance, and they don’t care if you laugh.

Theory Number Two is the boredom factor. Has their ever been a time in the military when the operative rule hasn’t been “hurry up and wait”? When there’s nothing else to do, when they’re are no computer games to play, no TV shows to watch, no malls to troll, you dance.

Theory Number Three is that, living as they do in women free environments, military guys know how to make the best of their time in women’s company. This means they’re more willing than civilians to go where the women go — and that’s the dance floor.

And Theory Number Four is, simply, the joy of being alive. Neither urbanites nor suburbanites live on the thin edge. Our biggest adrenalin rush is often slipping past a Highway Patrol guy when we’re going — gasp! — five miles over the speed limit. For the men on the front line, though, joie de vivre is a very real thing, and it probably does make you feel like dancing.

UPDATE: I’d love to see how the dancing Marines would have handled this interview.

Well-known Leftists in the media and academia are puffing how scandal-free the Obama administration has been. Michelle Malkin points out that the only way they can make that statement with a straight face is if they’re playing the three monkeys game:

The truly vile page I referenced in my post title is Hundred Million Person Hate Israel. Thankfully, so far it’s only got 30,000 people (out of a 100,000,000 goal) “liking” this incitement to destructive antisemitism, but cancers like this shouldn’t be allowed to grow.

If you have a Facebook page, you can report the site by clicking the above link, which will take you to the page. On the far left hand side of the page, near the bottom, you’ll see a link saying “Report Page.” Click on the link and go for it. I submitted two reports on the page, one for anti-religious hate speech and one for racial/ethnic hate speech.

This is an exercise in pure speculation. I invite all here to bring their own notions to the table.

An old friend of mine visited me last Saturday to catch up on things. We walked my dog and began a long conversation that ended later in my backyard over coffee and tea.

Bob is fascinated by history, and has been a long-time contributor to print and online history publications. So our conversations often veer off into that realm. Because we have developed a years-long habit of riffing on whatever thoughts come to our heads, we never know where one of our history threads will go.

We were discussing the dark ages, which not only were characterized by the disintegration of the Roman political order, but also the loss of an immense store of practical technological knowledge: agricultural practices and implements; construction techniques—it would take until the 19th century for Europeans to match the Romans’ road-building prowess—war machines; distribution and warehousing; science; art (which in Roman times was the realm of artisans, not self-absorbed “transgressive” pricks).

I said that I think we are headed for a “soft dark ages.” That took him aback. “How are we headed there,” he asked, “and how would they be ‘soft’?”

I answered his last question first. They would be “soft” because unlike what happened in Roman times, we have the ability to store gigantic amounts of information in small spaces. One person can carry around encyclopedic knowledge on a flash drive. Multiply him by the millions, and you have a vast repository of recoverable knowledge that is private, widely dispersed, and replicated many times over. No matter how determined or persistent this era’s barbarians—Marxists, Muslims, Democrats, unionists, academicians—they simply would not be able to track down and destroy all modern technological knowledge.

But beyond furtive individual efforts at hiding and protecting the knowledge we would need to create a New America or a New West, there would be vaster, more organized, more collective efforts to protect knowledge until better days. I suggested to Bob three institutions or concepts that would become the next dark ages’ hallmarks: The new castle fortress; the new monastic life; and the new Europe.

1. The Return of the Castle Fortresses

If the United States, Europe and China disintegrate, as seems likely, there will be a scramble for political power among the remnant provinces, states, and regions. Most power will be wielded by Marxist thugs and old-fashioned warlords, so it would not be surprising to see China devolve to its pre-Qin Dynasty pattern of warring neighbor states, or America’s big cities—Chicago, Detroit, Washington—and its Mexicanized rural regions, become brutal satrapies run by the people like Jesse Jackson, Bill Ayers, La Raza, ethnic mafias, and the like.

Europe could begin a too-late, doomed-to-fail ethnic cleansing of its Muslim underclass, but would probably slip either into fascism or dhimmitude. Poland, the bravest of the European nations, might be able to escape either fate, although that would be doubtful given its lack of firepower and its closeness to the greatest of all the European barbarian states, Russia.

But the barbarians would not win everywhere. Just as Old Europe in the dark ages had its bright centers of learning, protected by force of arms, there would be parts of the world that would not succumb to the new barbarity. They would become mankind’s new castles, fortresses of resistance where decency and unpoliticized science might still flourish.

These new fortresses will not have thick walls and deep moats, although their means of protection metaphorically will be the same. Their moats will be the ability of their computer geniuses to resist and thwart attacks upon their databases, and their walls will be heavily and well armed soldiers and citizens who will unhesitatingly destroy any physical threat to their sanctuaries.

Where will the new fortresses be? Either in lands that can protect themselves or are far enough away from the barbarians that they will be difficult to invade and hold. In the former case, Texas and Utah come to mind, states whose populations are already armed and whose economic infrastructures already lay upon solid technological foundations. More remote places, like New Zealand, Alberta, Baja California, could set up defendable dark age redoubts if they were properly armed, including with nuclear weapons.

There would be secret places, too. Large nations and corporations have set aside fortified places where they can stash tools, seeds, patents, rare materials, genealogies, and other irreplaceable items. Assuming that some of them will not be expropriated by the new barbarians, these vital repositories of knowledge could be available for a later renaissance.

2. The New Monastic Life

If the fortresses hold, they will become the new monasteries. Instead of patiently copying barely understood manuscripts from a fallen civilization, the new monastics will preserve the old science that they already well understand and attempt to build on it.

The ends they pursue will be the advancement of medicine (especially countermeasures to the barbarians’ chemical and biological weapons); the protection of personal data against spying or theft; the subversion of the barbarians’ computer and weapons systems (think Stuxnet); and the preservation of seminal texts that will one day replace the adulterated, denatured literature of the new emperors.

In contrast, the science of the barbarians will, because of barbarians’ nature, focus on predictable ends: refining the capacity to deliver death, whether it be through abortion, euthanasia, or mass murder against political opponents; improving methods of surveillance and the control of communications, “education,” and literature; honing tools designed to hunt down wealth or knowledge and expropriate it; and finding ways to increase the lifespans and sexual abilities of the rulers.

3. The New Europe

In the old dark ages, Europe itself was the physical locus of quiet scholarship and the preservation of old knowledge that later flowered into the Renaissance. In the “soft dark ages,” ones cushioned by the existence of fierce armed “monks” in well-defended freeholds, the New Europe will be a state of mind. In some ways, it will be how the Catholic Church sees itself: No matter where you go or what language you speak, there are the universal constants of the Mass and the Magisterium.

Similarly, wherever our new defenders of knowledge and decency find themselves — Patagonia, the Outback, the remote Rocky Mountains, the bowels of Obama-ite Chicago — they will share a common love of truth and real science. They will know how to detect falsehood and be indifferent to the barbarians’ enticements. Whatever secret handshake they develop, it will be something that the barbarians might know exists, but will, like their Vandal and Mongol forerunners, never understand.

How long will it take for the soft dark ages to run their course? Who could tell? My concern is that there remain a core of people who will resist the thugocracy, bloodlessly and not, until the thugs’ own fatal contradictions do them in. The United States defeated the Soviet Union because the USSR not only lived a lie, but because it had long before killed off its best and smartest people.

That pattern will repeat itself among our Marxist, Muslim, and academic brethren. But while they will be doomed to repeat a history of failure and debasement, our destiny will call for us to recreate the wonderful things that men once called “the West” and “America.”